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Navigating AI's Impact on Marketing: Linda Melone Shares Her Toolkit
138 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans sits down with seasoned marketer Linda Melone to explore how AI is transforming the marketing landscape.
Linda shares her personal journey, from transitioning out of the fitness industry into content writing and copywriting, to embracing AI tools like ChatGPT to streamline her workflows. She discusses the challenges and opportunities AI presents, offering insights into how she selects and utilizes various AI-powered platforms to maintain authentic, high-quality content for her clients.
The conversation dives into the importance of personalizing marketing in an AI-driven world, the balance between automation and human touch, and predictions for the future of AI in marketing.
Whether you’re new to AI or already experimenting, this episode offers valuable perspectives on how to navigate this fast-evolving space.
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Transcript
AI's Impact on Marketing
00:00:08
Speaker
AI has turned many industries upside down in a very short period of time, disrupting and revolutionizing the way that businesses operate. It's also opened up a world of possibilities in marketing, giving marketers a treasure trove of tools to work smarter, faster, and more effectively. But with this luxury of options comes a challenge. How do you decide which tools to use and, as importantly, how do you extract value from them?
00:00:35
Speaker
With so many AI-powered tools, it can sometimes feel overwhelming.
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast where we dive into the strategies, tools, and insights that help marketers and entrepreneurs thrive in today's fast-paced world. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Linda Malone, a seasoned marketer who has embraced AI to jumpstart and streamline her daily workflows. Linda, welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:00:59
Speaker
thank you so much mark i'm really looking forward to this like a lot of people we connected a few years ago on linkedin during covid it was a way for us to stay sane and stay connected. Since that time when we first met your entrepreneurial journey has evolved and changed i'd like to delve into the personal and talk about what is the last few years been for you as a marketer and has the focus of your business shifted as a result.
Linda Malone's AI Journey
00:01:26
Speaker
It's been such a gradual change with, I'm thinking primarily of chat GPT and we talk about a AS, a lot of other platforms and software and AI tools that I do use, but it snuck into what I was doing without me even realizing it. I don't even remember the first time I used chat, but that was how I got started. It changed over time as I learned more about it, worked with it,
00:01:50
Speaker
took classes with people, got guidance from copywriting coaches and just learned how to incorporate it in different ways that it evolved. Your business has changed over the last couple of years. You were focused on a particular sector and now you're focused on the health and fitness area, which is yeah a long time love of yours. Why did that happen? did Did technology have anything to do with it? What happened is I was a content writer, magazine writer for many years, like 15 years.
00:02:17
Speaker
at 15, 20 years. I got out of that when the print publications collapsed and it became all digital. I wasn't able to make the money I was making. I was literally making 25% of what I was making for print. As you mentioned, I've been a personal trainer for about the same time, and that's the two were working together for a while till I just ditched all the personal training. But I i started an online course for Women Over 50, fitness course.
00:02:44
Speaker
I was marketing. I didn't know the first thing about copywriting or marketing. I just did it by the seat of my pants. There's a lot that I would have done differently now. That was one of the reasons why I feel like I couldn't really get it off the ground like I wanted to. So I decided to go back to writing and went into copywriting and I thought, okay, I can do copywriting for health and fitness.
Specializing in Health and Fitness Marketing
00:03:05
Speaker
I started taking some high-level copywriting courses with some good coaches and was told SaaS is really the way to go. and Even if you don't know a lot about SaaS, that's where they have the biggest marketing budgets. I said, let me just do that. But I noticed that the companies that were coming to me somehow knew, I don't know if they just did their research, but they were tended to be health and fitness
00:03:28
Speaker
Companies were asking me to do their copywriting I still wasn't really clear on it because I thought is it I just didn't think there was money in it I didn't think there was a marketing budget in a lot of these companies So I resisted it for the longest time and literally just this past year. I realized that was my differentiator and I was a personal trainer for a long time and I wasn't on expert panels for Fitness and that was I just knew it so well. I thought why not?
00:03:58
Speaker
Just take my knowledge and use it to my advantage instead of seeing it as something like i was those bored with it after you you do something for so i was just writing if i have to describe one more time i do a bison i'm gonna scream it just was like that sort of thing so i resisted it and then i realize okay if i go in at the beat of the angle.
00:04:19
Speaker
helping the SaaS company that sells software to gym owners, I could do that and still incorporate my fitness background because of what I know about their customers.
Market Changes and AI's Impact on Writing
00:04:30
Speaker
So that's how it evolved to where it is right now. I love the idea of combining passion and experience and expertise with serving customers who who need somebody with the main expertise and understands their business. I think a ah lot of B2B marketers have gone through the same journey because the market is super competitive right now. The marketing landscape goes up and down depending on the economy and amount of venture capital. It's been an interesting year for a lot of marketing consultants who have had to make some changes. Some of them have been forced upon them, some of them have been
00:05:02
Speaker
About season opportunities like it sounds like you' you've done twenty twenty four seems like a new fresh year for many many marketers but let's get back to a i. Something that obviously. Dominance landscape and something that you and i think about a lot. You mentioned off the top that i snuck up on you and i think.
00:05:22
Speaker
One of the things that I think about is AI has been around for a long time. In fact, some of the tools that we use for a long time have incorporated AI. They just didn't talk about them. It wasn't sexy. It was just the way that software operated. But everything changed two years ago in chat GPT was launched and AI was thrown into the mainstream. When you look back at that period of time, and I think it affected us writers in particular, because chat2pt was an instantly a tool to do writing. Were you surprised by how quickly chat2pt has exploded, and by the way, the whole AI landscape has taken off as well? is Or did you, when you saw chat2pt, did you say, oh this is just the beginning of something amazingly fantastic, or amazingly terrifying, if the way you look at it?
00:06:18
Speaker
At first, I was amazed at how fast. I can't believe it's been two years. I feel like I can't remember when I didn't use AI now because it's so infiltrated into different aspects of my business. But yeah, it took off faster than anyone really expected. It just seemed like that it wasn't there and then all of a sudden it's everything. As a copywriter,
00:06:40
Speaker
It's challenging and frustrating. I see it as companies are using it to do their writing, but I think it's the companies that really don't understand how AI falls flat. I have a client who's asked me to do some blogs. I don't usually do blogging. It's usually part of a package, but I'm going to do it for this one client. This has happened with more than one client. What I do is I cut and paste what they currently have, and I pop it into an AI. The one I was using is Quillbot.
00:07:08
Speaker
It's an AI content detector and it said 100 percent of this is 100 percent. Then what's interesting is the same app. I was just doing this before I got on here because I was playing around with it. and It said, okay, if you want it to be refined to sound more like a person, put it in here. They have a paraphrasing part of it. so I did that and it says it's 100 percent AI refined. so You can't get away from it. and it's just Frustrated because a lot of people think that's good enough. And yeah, it falls short. And I think there's the conundrum between in the content world between good enough and really good. and A lot of companies, a lot of entrepreneurs have defaulted to good enough. I have a client and we talk about writing blog posts and website content. And he just says, just have chatgbt do it. And as a long time writer, it
00:07:59
Speaker
pains me, it just causes me it' so much anxiety and I have to say, no, we have to do better than that. We just cannot be so obvious that we're using AI.
Exploring AI Tools with Mark and Linda
00:08:09
Speaker
yeah When you look at your portfolio, I'm really curious about this because I think a lot of marketers are in the same boat. What does your AI toolbox look like right now in terms of run in your own business and the tools that you use for clients. like We've all got our go-to tools and then maybe after you talk about your toolbox, I can open my toolbox up and show you what I'm using these days.
00:08:34
Speaker
Mainly, it's chat. I have the $20 a month upgraded version. That's the one I use most of the time. I have tried other ones. There was one, I think it was called Blaze, and it said their website was really cool. It's all like cartoon like graphics and stuff. It said, we can copy your voice because the biggest argument against using AI or actually just hiring a copywriter in general. is oh i don't I'm afraid they're not going to get my voice right. so That's a huge concern. I was trying it to see, okay, can they really get my voice? You put in your own information and have it do its thing. It was so far off base. this is and I'm thinking, this is not anything I would write. If I sound this nasty because it really had me like,
00:09:18
Speaker
I'm a pretty direct person. I don't know where they pulled this from, but it was not me. But I try out things like that. But right now, it's mainly chat. I use something for LinkedIn that I recently found called Redact AI. Have you heard of this one? I haven't. I just use it this morning for my posts on LinkedIn. You can take your previous posts. So I took a post that was really popular about two years ago that I did.
00:09:40
Speaker
And it will reframe it. So it's all your information. It can also do it from just telling it what you want to write, but I don't trust it for that. But I will take a post that was really popular, ask it to reframe it, rewrite parts of it, and then I go in and change it around a little bit. But that's what I posted this morning. It just saves a ton of time. But that's pretty much LinkedIn specific.
00:10:03
Speaker
Other than that, it's really just I use chat for outlining things, for distilling down what's the most important part of this conversation I had with someone. Those are the things I find it most valuable for. I used it today for um interview, I just checked in to see, is there anything in these questions that you're asking me or my own personal opinion? So this really wasn't much. But some of the AI tools I was looking at, and it's a really, I'm not using a whole lot of them, but I find that chat within chat, there's other ones in there too. There's different chats that you can, I don't know if you've seen it, like you can dally the yeah yeah theater.
00:10:45
Speaker
This is my toolbox. I use chat GPT. I have the $20 plan. It's probably the best money that I spend on marketing. The ah ROI is amazing. And I think one of the things about chat GPT and you epitomize this is it's so powerful. It does so much yeah that it.
00:11:03
Speaker
overshadows other applications because why would you pay for something else when chat GPD can do it? But I would say in my toolbox, some of the things that I use Descript dot.com is an amazing editing tool for video and audio. So the way that it works is you upload your your file and then you can edit it using the text rather than editing clips. So for someone like me,
00:11:26
Speaker
It makes podcast production video, making videos so much easier and so much faster. And you can add interstitials and preload and captions. It's just so amazing. That's a $20, $30 a month tool. WorkTune is another tool and you can take a sentence or a paragraph and have it give you three or four or five different suggestions on how to rewrite it. Grammarly has been around for a long time.
00:11:50
Speaker
I think a lot of people use the free or the paid version. And the one thing about Grammarly, it's always been AI. That's how the engine has improved through the use of AI. And now it's interesting to them to see that they're waving the AI flag these days. And the tool that I really want to use, and I haven't got into it yet, is something called HeyGen, H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com. What it does is you record yourself for two minutes. You can talk about anything. Oh, I've heard about that. It captures your facial expressions. After it does that, then the algorithm builds an avatar or a profile of you, and then you can feed copy into Hey Gen to create videos that eerily look like you. It is you, but
00:12:41
Speaker
and It's all computer generated. I can write a post or I can record an audio video and it turns into do a video which would be Unbelievable. I'm probably just scraping the surface here in terms of some of the tools that you're using. I'm sure there's tools I use that are AI powered. I don't even know it. I was going to say that just the a copywriter, a copywriting coach just posted about that yesterday. I did not yet watch his video, but he posted in a Facebook group that I belong to. He said that he used this and he said he was both mesmerized and terrified by it. And he goes, you have to listen to what this thing came up with. And people are like, holy cow. So I have to go back and listen to it, but it must be, yeah.
00:13:19
Speaker
I use Opus, I didn't mention that, so I forgot about the podcast, Opus clips, yeah and I use something called PodSqueeze. I think PodSqueeze is using chat GPT for, and it's a podcast summary tool, right? Or a podcast, it does all kinds of things for podcasts. Are you on the lookout for new AI tools that will help you do your work faster, easier, or better? What are some of the ways that you discover and evaluate new tools? Because we're all trying to build our toolbox. We're all trying to make things a lot better. So do you have a methodology, or is it just ad hoc, or do you get newsletters? What's your AI discovery process?
00:13:58
Speaker
it's interesting is I get a lot of ideas from LinkedIn. There's people who are always posting about a tool like this one that this is Facebook, but the copywriting coach, i'm I'm today when I get some time, I'm going to look at exactly what he was using. I'm not sure if it was the one that you're talking about. But I usually hear about from other people redact AI,
00:14:17
Speaker
is what I heard about that from somebody on LinkedIn who always talks about AI. I've tried a lot of the other recommendations that he's put out, but his niche, but I didn't like a lot of them. I just didn't resonate with me. But this one did, and it was surprisingly good. But I just tried different things. Like Blaze tried it for a month. I tried their free program.
00:14:40
Speaker
didn't like it, just couldn't get it to work and I just ditched it. I have a list in front of me I keep on my computer monitor. I just try things and see how they work, see what other people are talking about.
Discovering New AI Tools
00:14:51
Speaker
I don't get a specific AI newsletter, but I do. It's all over. People are always talking about different things. Unfortunately, I get many ai newsletters with the data and they just s seduce me i'm just sucker for new tools i see things i kept a screen capture them and i got my computer's probably overflowing with software and lock it just terrible one other thing i will say about all these ai jockeys on linkedin they're so aggressive in terms of trying to position themselves as these gurus who spend all the time testing out these different tools they're so deep in the weeds
00:15:25
Speaker
in terms and they have to be because they're trying to generate all this new content all the time that a lot of their tools are like really it's like going to like the world's biggest buffet and it keeps on getting bigger and bigger and after a while you're overwhelmed they just want to go back to a diner that has five choices so that's what we live in you look at you you use chat gpt and i probably use four or five different tools and that's about it the one thing i wanted to add about the chat gpt is how you can personalize your chat like the one that i created you can create your own The one I created, it's only with the $20 a month program though. I created one that merges my voice, my um information, and my copywriting coaches that I've worked with. So everything I get I know is from that well, because it usually actually the voice does sound like it's one of my coaches that I i used to work with. So I know that and if it's something that's very specific to copywriting or research, I will go into that one before I i do just the general chat.
00:16:21
Speaker
I'm going to give you a chat GPT hack. I hope that none of my clients are listening, but here's what I do for every single client now is I will create a custom GPT. I will load in all their sales and marketing collateral, their sales decks, their investor decks, brochures,
00:16:39
Speaker
Anything i get my hands on and i'll create a custom gbt when i'm doing work for a client. Putting together content frameworks or maybe the grand copy that just has to put through i'll run it through a custom gbt i'm trying to. Enhance or augment the engine so that it.
00:16:56
Speaker
takes into account very specific content about a very specific client. That's one of the ways that I'm trying to leverage chat TBT in a very different way. I'm not sure I i get better results in just using chat TBT, but it makes me feel better. It makes me think that I'm being innovative. i That's a great idea. It's really interesting to see how would if you have a client and you want to see if your content changes because of that, I would definitely check it out. One thing I didn't want to ask you about is the ability for marketing to be personal and authentic at a time when so much content is automated.
Personalization in AI Marketing
00:17:35
Speaker
We've all leaned into the idea that our our marketing needs to be empathetic and the more personal we are, the more affected it will be, especially in a multitasking world in which people feel that they need to drive connections.
00:17:50
Speaker
What's the balancing act for you when you're doing work for your clients and making sure that their marketing is empathetic and it does drive personal connections versus the ability to just basically generate content at scale that's not personalized and is very generic. I always go back to what I say if you're having a conversation with someone, are these words that you would use? It doesn't have to be But for example, one of the things that I pulled up just using the AI generator earlier, but started out by saying it might be difficult to set your gym or studio apart from competitors in a saturated fitness industry. I don't think people talk like that.
00:18:29
Speaker
i you know I read it and I thought, how would I change that? I would say it's a jungle out there. It's competitive. like How would you say that to somebody who you're working with? so That's probably the number one thing I use because what chat GPT lacks is personality.
00:18:45
Speaker
And it loves run-on sentences. Three different points they make in every sentence, and it's like, all right. But I use that. Is this what people are saying? Is this in the language that my client's customers, not even my client, but what their audience would use? You only know that by talking to them. Is this something they'd say? Is this something, the words they'd use? And then it comes back to if you were to meet somebody on a social outing, would you say this to them? And I think that's how you get the best copy.
00:19:16
Speaker
I got a newsletter ah from somebody recently, at at the top of the newsletter was a little disclaimer that said, this content was human powered. I wrote it myself, I didn't use chatgbt. And it got me thinking that maybe there's a brand strategy formed some companies to be very open and clear about the fact that their content is written by humans, not robots. We're very skeptical, like a lot of people are skeptical about content these days because they think it's being written by chat GPT and many companies are doing it and you can see that they're doing it. But what's your take on a company that openly declares that all their content is written by humans or
00:20:12
Speaker
will be very specific about the fact that this ebook was written by a human. Do you think that's a way for a company to stand out from the crowd and gain a competitive advantage? Or do you think that it maybe puts all their content into question that people will say, was this written by a human? Was this written by chat GPT? What's your take on that? I almost think it's you're trying too hard at that point. My first thought was people are looking for good content. They're looking for value. What is it that is in that copy? And is it something they can really use? Cause I find like a lot of chat GPT information is just,
00:20:53
Speaker
What you hear everywhere. That's a great question. If I receive something like that, this is human written. I think my first thought would be why wouldn't it be? like I don't assume things are always going to be chat. But you can tell websites I expect it to be because that's all I see anymore. um But if you're sending me an e-mail and that e-mail is written by chat GPT or a DM and LinkedIn, which are all, it looks like they're all written by chat, even responses. comments yeah I guess I feel like if you don't, it's somebody saying, let me be honest with you. You're not being honest with them.
00:21:29
Speaker
but This is actually human written. Why wouldn't it be? So I don't know. To me, it would almost work against you. I'd have to see an actual email sent like that because I think I did see something when you said that it's, I got something recently about that, but I don't know. Should we have to say that? I guess is my big question. Maybe it's a short term play. Maybe the fact that everybody's skeptical about chat GBT is it's a bit of a cute tool, a cute way to stand out from the crowd, but it's a very interesting branding issue.
00:21:59
Speaker
What advice do you have for marketers who are hesitant about adopting AI? There's a lot of people like you and I that jump into it. There's people that are aggressively embracing it. And there's lots of people who just aren't sure about AI, especially about using AI to create content.
Effective Use of AI in Marketing
00:22:21
Speaker
What advice would you give them if they said to you, Linda, I'd like to use AI, but I'm afraid of ah losing my authenticity, or I'm afraid of plagiarism, or I'm afraid of being revealed as having written content that uses chat GBT.
00:22:38
Speaker
I would say to use it as you would use Google because now even when you get on Google, I think AI kicks in like automatically now, but don't use it to write. Then you avoid that whole problem. Use it to brainstorm. You need some ideas. To me, it saves so much time with coming up with ideas. you have a blog If you have a blog or you have an email that you have to send out or something that you need to create and you just you have that writer's block you just stuck that's when it's. Great to use chat can i list twelve ideas. apparently It works and that if you're polite to it.
00:23:14
Speaker
It was a little bit creepy when I asked it a question earlier today and it had my name in it because I would say thank you. and I'm like, I did not put my name in this. It's already starting. But I would say use it for idea generation, use it for organizing your work. I've asked it even to organize my day. I have to do this and this.
00:23:36
Speaker
Can you help me prioritize? It doesn't just have to be content, but I think that's a way to get into it a little bit and don't rely on it for content, like rely on it for ideas, for brainstorming, for titles, for subject lines. it It's a matter of just working with it, apparently getting to know your name. Yeah. The other piece of advice I think I would give marketers is that It's a great way of summarizing conversations and meeting. You can be on a Zoom call and you can use something like Fathom to record the call and and get the transcript. And then you can ask chat GBT to highlight the most interesting ideas or the key topics or the priorities that were raised during the conversation. It's an amazing way of synthesizing information and then allowing you to make strategic and tactical decisions. Final question, this is a hard one. This is asking you,
00:24:28
Speaker
ah Looking ahead, are there any AI trends or tools that you're excited about? Where do you think AI is going to next impact the marketing landscape?
Future AI Trends in Marketing
00:24:40
Speaker
When you look into your crystal ball, is there parts of marketing that you think are ripe for disruption or any trends that you see that you're excited about or terrified about?
00:24:51
Speaker
The thing that pops out the most to me is a personalization. Just really getting to know your audience, like ah especially like I work with mainly health and fitness people and there's new software that tracks with the person's permission, the member's permission that tracks them as they go through the gym and see if they have a particular challenge. And then they have the option of having somebody call them or help them with that.
00:25:19
Speaker
exercise. I think that is really exciting. So even just personalizing, getting to know your customers even more, you have to talk to them. But in addition to that, just the research that you can do to get a head start on all of it, I think is really what's exciting. And then narrowing down your niche based on that, where is it that you see be most beneficial to them and also lucrative to your business?
00:25:48
Speaker
I think that's probably the most exciting thing. Gamification. for This is like for gyms and stuff, like creating games out of fitness. um But I think it's probably just the the personalization is going to be huge.
Where to Find Linda Malone Online
00:26:05
Speaker
Final, final question. Where can people learn about you and what you do?
00:26:10
Speaker
I'm on LinkedIn almost every day, and you can find me there. I have some freebies on my website as well. It's thecopyworks.com. I also have a newsletter that goes out every Thursday. Thanks, Linda, and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and of course, share it via social media.
00:26:35
Speaker
If you're a B2B or SaaS company with sales of $1 million to $10 million, dollars and you're looking for strategic and tactical help, we should talk about how I can help you do marketing that drives outcomes, whether that's lead sales, brand awareness, or simply completing key projects. Reach out via email, market mark at markevans.ca, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.